And the Play Anthropocene Photo of the Year award goes to...
Your latest digest of video game and climate change news from the past two weeks.
Welcome to the latest edition of Play Anthropocene!
Today is Tuesday, June 13, and we’re covering the latest developments in the world of video games and climate change. Happy reading!
This photo of a Diablo 4 commercial sure is something…
The origins of Play Anthropocene were partly born out of a desire for more dedicated coverage to the numerous areas where video games and the climate crisis, in all its many facets, were constantly interacting with one another.
Another, more selfish reason for starting this newsletter, however, was to simply use video games as an excuse to talk about the climate crisis, and vice versa. I usually try to be somewhat subtle about that ulterior motive in practice, but, for today, I shall proceed in the same manner that this harrowing photo began, and ditch any semblance of subtext.
Last week, wildfires raging across Canada blanketed large swathes of North America in smoke, exposing over 100 million people to dangerous air quality across the continent. One city hit particularly hard by the outbreak was New York City, where - in scenes that are sadly becoming all too familiar across our news and social media feeds - the entire skyline was engulfed in a ominously orange hue.
“The most important thing you can do to fight climate change is to talk about it” Katharine Hayhoe
This leads us to this section’s header image, which captured an unfortunate moment where Diablo 4’s marketing campaign perhaps came across a little too close for comfort for its targeted audience. As I say, there’s no highfalutin point I’m about to make exploring the links between air pollution and Judaeo-Christian worldviews of purgatory, or anything like that. Instead, sharing this photo really is just an excuse for me to vent some of the upset and dismay that tends to bubble up whenever another story of a horrific wildfire hits the news.
Wildfires are terrifying, not just as a visceral reflection of a warming world, but also for the implications they hold as part of what climate scientists call Positive Feedback Loops. Rising temperatures leads to the likelihood of more frequent and intensive wildfires, which in turn destroys more habitat and carbon-storing woodland, which in turn releases more carbon into the atmosphere, which in turn contributes to further warming, which in turn leads to even more frequent and intensive wildfires. It’s a scary cycle to comprehend, especially as it’s one that will only get faster and more violent as we continue down this road.
Another reason I started Play Anthropocene is because I was, and still am, very concerned about the way that things are going, then, and talking about the crisis isn’t just a coping mechanism for me, but, I hope, one small way of contributing to the Overton window shift that is needed for a radical course correction. And so while these alarming events are hardly the nicest reality check for the state of the planet, they nevertheless remain a potent reminder that the world is changing, and unless we do more to change our way of life first, then wildfires such as these will continue to become less of a bug, and more a feature of our new reality.
Anyway, on to more encouraging things…
Solarpunk’s Kickstarter success reflects a growing appetite for playable futures we’d actually want to live in
Coincidence is a funny thing. We spend years waiting for one open world sandbox game centred on travelling between mysterious sky islands via our own battery-powered DIY contraptions, and then two come along at once.
To be fair, Solarpunk isn’t coming out anytime soon, with a TBD launch window that will hopefully give it enough breathing room away from the discourse-suffocating majesty of Tears of the Kingdom, but the similarities between the two titles are striking nonetheless, at least at face value.
Solarpunk has plenty of its own distinctions beyond that eerily familiar surface, however, as outlined within the game’s newly launched (and already mega successful) Kickstarter page. Developed by German studio Cyberware, the project is described as a “cosy survival craft game” where players “use sunlight, wind and water to create an energy system and automate your processes like gathering resources and watering your plants to build your dream home in the sky.”
The game’s title is a direct nod to the science-fiction genre of the same name, one which imagines a future where technological progress has advanced in tandem with a full transition to clean energy, and therefore offers something of a counternarrative to the apocalyptic visions of the future that we’re so used to consuming in pop culture.
And trust me, we need more of those counternarratives; while dystopian fiction can act as an alarming wake-up call for the climate uninitiated when consumed in moderation, the sheer overwhelming number of such stories can feed into climate doomist sentiments suggesting we’re already past the point of no return, subsequently disempowering people from taking action.
Solarpunk can be a remedial tonic to doomism’s infectious malaise of fatalistic existentialism, then, offering a more inspirational form of futurism that gets excited for the kind of world we could live in, rather than giving up on the one we ought to be avoiding. We’ve seen a few mainstream games draw inspiration from the solarpunk scene in the past, such as 2021’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (or at least a single level within it), but few have engaged with the genre beyond its aesthetically pleasing surface level.
It’s encouraging, then, to see Cyberwave’s latest game make such an overt appeal to that milieu, although jury’s out on how far the game will engage with the source material of its title. I’m as equally interested in the cosy survival vibes as every other Solarpunk backer, yes, but I’m also hoping for a game which empowers and equips players to see just how far they can go when working in partnership with their natural surroundings.
The votes have been cast for Green Game Jam 2023
I feel the need to apologise; the previous edition of Play Anthropocene did nothing to inform you of last week’s opportunity to vote for your favourite entry in the Green Game Jam 2023, meaning the cut off point has come and gone, and here I am only just telling you about it now. So, uh… yeah. Sorry about that.
Nevertheless, the Green Game Jam is still worth highlighting in today’s newsletter, if only to spotlight some of the entries for this year’s contest, which is headed up by the United Nations’ Playing for the Planet coalition. For 2023, the jam asked participants to focus on the theme of biodiversity, and specifically to come up with Green Activations centred around the conservation of three endangered species: the Amazon’s Harlequin Toad, the Himalayan Snow Leopard, and the manta rays of the Western Indian Ocean.
The results have varied greatly in scale, ranging from Subway Surfers, where players will be able to play an entirely new level set in the Amazon, to Clash Royale, where “an article in the game's Inbox educates players about species and ecosystem conservation”.
A more noticeable pattern, however, is that - with the exception of Ubisoft’s Brawlhalla - almost all of the entrants are mobile titles. That’s not a huge surprise, of course, as it’s no doubt easier for a Green Activation to be put together within a mobile game, where resources and workflow are already oriented towards regularly updating the game experience at a pace that AAA production is rarely able to match, even for live service titles.
We shouldn’t push our noses up at the potential impact of these mobile Green Activations either; mobile titles have the largest audience of any gaming platform by far, and so the reach of such awareness/funds raising events often extends a lot further than their console equivalents.
Even so, it would be great to see some more bigger hitters involved, especially when last year’s jam included the likes of Rider’s Republic and Horizon: Forbidden West. I’d love for more of these kinds of titles use their stories and gameplay to meaningfully integrate players into a Green Activation that doesn’t just get them thinking about climate change, but offers an experience that is enjoyable to play in and of itself. An article in my daily Clash Royale inbox is a great start, but it’s barely scratching the surface of what’s really possible for what this jam is asking.
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Find me on Twitter: @alexavard95